


General Tso's Golden Palace of Wisdom and Shrimp Fried Rice

by carolinecrane



Category: I Want To Go Home! - Gordon Korman
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 13:17:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2813312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinecrane/pseuds/carolinecrane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there are fortune cookies and unnecessary pining, and Rudy needs to work on his communication skills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	General Tso's Golden Palace of Wisdom and Shrimp Fried Rice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gala_apples](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/gifts).



“Where do you suppose people found out about stuff before the internet?”

They’d been sitting in a booth at the back of a Chinese restaurant for an hour now, ankles touching under the table and fingers brushing together every so often when one of them reached for a water glass or the soy sauce.

“Is that a serious question?” Rudy asked, eyebrow raised in a way that told Mike he was expecting the answer to be ‘no’.

“Yeah, I mean, where do you think...say...nudists met other nudists before message boards and blogs and things? Was there a newsletter? Did they take out ads in the paper?”

“Is there something you’d like to tell me about your lifestyle choices, Mike?”

“No.” Mike blushed and picked up his fork, pushing the remains of his shrimp fried rice around on his plate for a second or two. “I’m just saying. That’s a pretty specific interest. I looked up all the stops along our trip on the internet in like ten minutes. But if there was no internet, how would we have known about the giant squid?”

“You said we didn’t have time for the giant squid,” Rudy said, voice laced with accusation.

“We don’t. I told you, if you had your heart set on Newfoundland we needed to leave at least a week earlier. Besides, you said you wanted to see Niagara Falls.”

“I said that as Canadians, it was our civic duty to visit Niagara Falls on the eve of embarking on the sacred tradition of higher education. Also I didn’t want to drive all the way across Quebec.”

Mike made a face at the thought and shook his head. “Definitely not.”

When Rudy had first come up with the idea of a pre-university road trip, they’d briefly discussed driving all the way to Vancouver and back. The idea of that much time together, just the two of them with no other obligations, had been really appealing. But there were orientations to plan around, and no amount of grumbling and insisting that he didn’t do placement tests didn’t exempt Rudy from flying to Chicago to test out of the first year of his math requirements at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

He’d tried to convince Mike to go along, and it wouldn’t have been a hard sell, since Mike had never even been out of Canada, but he had his own orientation at UT to attend, and as it turned out, the school didn’t reschedule freshmen orientations to accommodate last-minute trips to the States with his boyfriend.

“Twits,” Rudy had pronounced when Mike gave him the bad news. Mike had nodded solemnly and refrained from pointing out that the University of Toronto didn’t actually care who some random freshman was dating, or how distraught they both were at the thought of spending the next four years mostly apart.

Rudy was bearing the separation a bit more stoically than Mike, but a few times during their week on the road Mike had caught Rudy watching him from the passenger seat, or sometimes when he thought Mike had already fallen asleep in whatever hotel they’d landed at for the night. The look on his face was always impassive as ever, but Mike had known him long enough to tell there was something going on beside Rudy’s usual scheming.

It wasn’t just that Rudy kept looking at him as though he was trying to memorize Mike. The way Rudy kissed him was more intense as well, more sure in a way that Mike suspected meant Rudy was doing his best to make the most of the time they did have together. There had been a lot more hand-holding during their trip, too, while they were driving and while they were visiting whatever monuments Mike found on the map along their route, and every night when Rudy bent him practically in half and slid inside him.

There was still plenty of laughing, mainly on Mike’s part, and Rudy still refused to participate in anything he thought was too lame -- _be serious, Mike, I don’t do giant snowmen_ \-- but there was a weird sense of urgency about all of it, like they were both trying to pack as much in their week together as they could before they had to say goodbye.

Mike was positive that was the reason behind Rudy following him into a washroom in a busy diner two afternoons ago, locking the door behind them and pushing Mike up against the sink to drop to his knees and suck Mike off right there in a public place. The blow job definitely wasn’t out of character, and even the semi-public setting wasn’t that strange for Rudy, but the fact that he’d willingly kneeled on what was a fairly gross tile floor without complaint meant he was trying to prove some kind of point.

Trying to prove his loyalty, maybe, or trying to prove that ditching Mike for some fancy college in the States didn’t mean Rudy loved him any less. He didn’t love Mike any less, he just wanted to go to IIT more than he wanted to stay home and share a place with Mike for the next four years.

Not that Mike had complained, at least not to Rudy’s face. Sure, he’d hoped Rudy would make a different choice, but if he was that set on this particular program, Mike wasn’t going to stand in his way. He’d never been the kind of boyfriend to demand Rudy choose him over something he felt really strongly about, and he wasn’t going to start now. So he congratulated Rudy when he got his acceptance letter, and when Rudy suggested a road trip before he left for Chicago, Mike just started planning their route without complaint.

Now that they were down to their last night before heading home, he was a little less inclined to be understanding. Brooding about it wasn’t going to change Rudy’s mind, though, so instead Mike had found a Chinese place on his Yelp add with a decent rating and made Rudy pull off the highway.  
Rudy had lobbied for takeout and a nice hotel room, and there were parts of Mike that were definitely tempted. But if this was their last night together until Christmas holidays, it seemed only right that they sit down for a nice dinner before they started tearing each other’s clothes off. 

“How was the lo mein?” he asked, watching as Rudy pushed his plate away.

“Adequate.”

So okay, maybe a ‘nice dinner’ was subjective when it came to Rudy, but at least he hadn’t complained loud enough for the chef to hear and gotten them thrown out. Mike grinned, pushing his own plate out of the way and reaching for one of the fortune cookies the waitress had set down along with their bill.

“Aren’t you going to read your fortune?” he asked, nodding at the other cookie where it still rested on the table.

“I don’t do fortune cookies,” Rudy said, leaning back in the booth and crossing his arms over his chest.

Mike rolled his eyes and pulled his own cookie out of the plastic, then he broke it in half and eased the slip of paper out of the center. “Come on, it’s bad luck not to open your fortune.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Rudy answered, but Mike could hear the hint of amusement in his voice.

“Sometimes they give good advice,” Mike went on, glancing down at his fortune before he looked up to grin at Rudy again. “Mine, for instance, says, ‘Drop what you’re doing and call your mother’.”

“That’s good advice?” Rudy asked, but Mike was already reaching for his cell phone. And okay, he’d been planning to call home tonight anyway, just to give his folks a status update and an ETA, but the fact that his fortune reinforced the idea meant he had to do it.

MIke dialed home and listened while the phone rang, then again, and when the line connected it was his mom’s voice on the other end of the line. “Hi, hon,” she said when Mike said hello. “You boys still having a nice time?”

“Yeah, sure,” Mike said, glancing across the table at Rudy. He was looking back at Mike, that thoughtful expression on his face again, the one he usually only wore when he thought Mike wasn’t looking. His heart picked up speed and he wished suddenly that he’d agreed to skip dinner and just go to the hotel. “I was just calling to let you know we’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I’m glad you boys had a good trip,” his mom said, then he heard some rustling on the other end of the line. “You got a letter from the university today. It’s about your dorm placement.”

“Oh,” Mike said, his heart sinking a little at the reminder that in a couple weeks he’d be moving into a dorm room with a stranger instead of Rudy. “Anything I need to know?”

He shrugged when Rudy raised an eyebrow at him, but when his mom started talking again he frowned and turned his attention back to her. “What? Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, it’s right here in black and white,” his mother said.

“Okay.” Mike glanced over at Rudy again. “Okay. Thanks, Mom. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone and set it on the table, then he leaned forward on his elbows to fix Rudy with a suspicious glare.

“How’s your mother?” Rudy asked, not quite meeting Mike’s gaze.

“Fine. She says my dorm assignment came in the mail today,” Mike answered, voice a lot calmer than he felt. 

“Oh?” Rudy said, voice carefully neutral, and now Mike knew what his mother had told him wasn’t a mistake. “You got paired with a complete twit, I suppose.”

“Probably,” Mike said, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to hit Rudy or just kiss him really hard. “Some guy named Rudy Miller.”

Rudy made a noncommittal humming sound and continued to refuse to meet Mike’s eye. “So not a twit after all, then.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

Rudy shrugged, hands resting on the table now. “It didn’t seem relevant to our current plans.”

“It didn’t seem...Jesus Christ, Rudy,” Mike said. He reached up and ran his hands through his hair, then over his face before he looked up at Rudy again. “But you went to Chicago. You took those stupid placement tests. I saw the results arrive in the post.”

“I did,” Rudy answered. “It wasn’t any fun without you there.”

He was trying to stay mad at Rudy, he really was, because all Rudy had to do was tell Mike he’d had a change of heart. He had to know the news would have been welcome, but he was sitting across from Mike looking kind of nervous, so maybe he didn’t know it after all.

“If you’re not happy with your room assignment, you could always put in for a transfer. I’m sure there are plenty of clones still available to room with.”

Mike rolled his eyes and reached for his wallet, pulling out the last of his cash and tossing it on the table. He picked up Rudy’s still untouched fortune cookie and opened it, easing the thin paper out of the cookie and holding it up. “It’s bad luck not to read your fortune.”

“I told you, I don’t...”

“...do fortune cookies, yeah, yeah,” Mike said. He flattened the little paper with a flourish, looking down at it and letting out a laugh. “‘Love can last a lifetime, if you let it’.”

“Wisdom for the ages,” Rudy said, standing up and reaching out a hand to pull Mike out of the booth. Mike set the fortune down on the table and took Rudy’s hand, letting himself be pulled forward until he was pressed against Rudy’s chest.

“You’re sure about this?” Mike’s hand landed on Rudy’s waist, fingers curling around the soft cotton of his t-shirt. “I don’t want you giving up something important just to stay with me. I mean, I _do_ want that, but not if you’re going to regret it.”

“Mike,” Rudy said, leaning close enough for Mike to feel the warmth of Rudy’s breath against his lips, “I don’t do long distance relationships.”

Mike grinned against his mouth in the second before Rudy kissed him, hands still clasped together and pressed against their chests. Rudy would die before he ever admitted that he’d consent to anything so romantic as holding hands while they made out in the back of a Chinese restaurant somewhere in Ontario, but that was okay, because Mike knew what a romantic he was.

When they came up for air Rudy reached up with his free hand, thumb tracing the corner of Mike’s mouth before he let go. “I’d say it’s high time we find a room for the night.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Mike answered. He tried to tug Rudy toward the front of the restaurant, but Rudy held him in place and turned back toward the table. He reached down and picked up the fortune Mike had left on the table, slipping it in the pocket of his jeans before he turned back to Mike and raised an eyebrow.

“Something you wanted to say?” Rudy asked.

“Nope,” Mike said, fingers sliding through Rudy’s as they headed toward the door. “Nothing at all.”


End file.
